I don't think the press has done a very good job dealing with government spending.The Defense Department with the $9,500 toilet seat, that's not the problem anymore. Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security are the problem. That's us. That's our generation. There the press never says a word.

I also saw a huge expansion of the Internet, with many major corporations, afraid of being left behind, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop World Wide Web sites in a frantic scramble to reach the vast new consumer market of Web use

There are a number of people without whom I could not have written this book, but I hope you don't hold that against them. They are all fine people, and they had no idea how it would turn out.

Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

I read "Remembrance of Things Past" in the original French. I never start the day without reading me some [Marcel] Proust.

I have read that, on the average, the Japanese are getting taller, but at the moment they seem to be about the same height as American junior-high-school students, only with fewer guns.

Another well-known Paris landmark is the Arc de Triomphe, a moving monument to the many brave women and men who have died trying to visit it.